RETAIL TRADE: The Little King

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Through the swinging glass doors of Manhattan's "21" Club one night last week popped a roly-poly, melon-bald little man with the berry-bright eyes and beneficent smile of St. Nick touching down on a familiar rooftop. Louis Marx, America's toy king and cafe-society Santa, was arriving at his favorite workshop. With his beautiful blonde wife Idella, who looks the way sleigh bells sound, 59-year-old Lou Marx toddled regally toward a table in the center of the downstairs room. The table is always reserved for Millionaire Marx by the divine right of toy kings, and the fact that he has never been known to let anyone else pay the check.

While most celebrities go to "21" to play, Lou Marx also goes to ply. From the enlarged pockets of his $200 suits flows a tantalizing trickle of toys for his friends, who seem to include the entire world, and number such cronies as Baseballer Hank Greenberg (best man at his wedding), Comedian Edgar Bergen, Lieut. General Emmett ("Rosie") O'Donnell, Boxer Gene Tunney, and Netherlands Prince Bernhard. For them, there are walking penguins and tail-twirling Donald Ducks, statuettes of the Presidents and lightly clad miniature nymphs, tiny cars and pistol-shaped flashlights, lapel buttons urging "Sit Tight with Ike" or "I Like Lou."

While other toymakers spend millions of dollars each year to promote their wares, Toycoon Marx is his own walking ad agency; he spent only $312 for advertising in 1955. He collects the famed and the publicized as though he were following the slogan on all his toy boxes: "One of the many Marx toys, have you all of them?" Marx, who still has a few notables to go, scrupulously includes those he knows in his endless fund of anecdotes and puts their children's names on his Christmas list. Among the thousands of gifts going out this week from Marx's toy shop are a 20-in. convertible coupe and a remote-control walking puppy for President Eisenhower's grandchildren. Altogether, Marx is a real-life Santa to more than 100,000 children. To the children of cops and waiters and charwomen, boys and girls in orphanages and other institutions, he gives a million toys a year.

Synthetic Security. Marx considers toys one of the higher forms of human ingenuity, and thinks a lot of the world's problems can be solved through them. "Apart from being good business," he intones, "it's important to buy children a lot of toys. When you keep a child supplied with toys, it gives him security, like an Indian woman gives her child by carrying him on her back. Toys give children love and attention synthetically."